Herbs and the Earth : An Evocative Excursion into the Lore & Legend of Our Common Herbs

“Charming, delightful, and a great companion for gardeners and naturalists alike.”—Booklist

Lavender, basil, hyssop, balm, sage, rue — the thinking gardener’s guide to herbs.

Writer/naturalist Henry Beston, a founding father of the environmental movement, believed that a strong connection to nature is essential. “It is only when we are aware of the earth and of the earth as poetry that we truly live,” Beston says in his now-classic Herbs and the Earth. In this book, Beston shares one of those connections as seen through the oldest group of plants known to gardeners.

“A garden of herbs,” he writes, “is a garden of things loved for themselves in their wholeness and integrity. It is not a garden of flowers, but a garden of plants which are sometimes very lovely flowers and are always more than flowers.” Whether you are already a committed herbalist or just dreaming of planting your first small garden, this book is a powerfully rich source of inspiration and information. As Roger B. Swain observes in his moving introduction, Herbs and the Earth has an intensity that evokes the herbs themselves, as if, pressed between the pages, their aroma has seeped into the pages.

This Nonpareil edition includes both an introduction by Roger B. Swain and an afterword by Bill McKibben.

Henry Beston was a founding spirit of the modern environmental movement. A New England naturalist, he had his first great success with Outermost House, the journal of a solitary year spent on a Cape Cod beach. Mr. Beston’s “chosen home,” however, was a farm in Maine where he wrote Herbs and the Earth.

Bill McKibben is a New England-based environmentalist, educator, and writer. He is the editor of the Library of America volume, American Earth, and author of more than a dozen books including the bestselling Falter, Deep Economy, and The End of Nature, which was the first book to warn the general public about the climate crisis. He lives in Vermont.